Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories
Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories

Author: Jerome Charyn

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2015-06-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0871404982

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Longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award Brooklyn is dead. Long live the Bronx! In Bitter Bronx, Jerome Charyn returns to his roots and leads the literary renaissance of an oft-overlooked borough in this surprising new collection. In Bitter Bronx, one of our most gifted and original novelists depicts a world before and after modern urban renewal destroyed the gritty sanctity of a land made famous by Ruth, Gehrig, and Joltin' Joe. Bitter Bronx is suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place, combining a keen eye for detail with Jerome Charyn's lived experience. These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row, amid a "land of deprivation…where fathers trundled home…with a monumental sadness on their shoulders." In "Lorelei," a lonely hearts grifter returns home and finds his childhood sweetheart still living in the same apartment house on the Concourse; in "Archy and Mehitabel" a high school romance blossoms around a newspaper comic strip; in "Major Leaguer" a former New York Yankee confronts both a gang of drug dealers and the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought in his old neighborhood; and in three interconnected stories—"Silk & Silk," "Little Sister," and "Marla"—Marla Silk, a successful Manhattan attorney, discovers her father's past in the Bronx and a mysterious younger sister who was hidden from her, kept in a fancy rest home near the Botanical Garden. In these stories and others, the past and present tumble together in Charyn's singular and distinctly "New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches" (John Leonard, New York Times). Throughout it all looms the "master builder" Robert Moses, a man who believed he could "save" the Bronx by building a highway through it, dynamiting whole neighborhoods in the process. Bitter Bronx stands as both a fictional eulogy for the people and places paved over by Moses' expressway and an affirmation of Charyn's "brilliant imagination" (Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune).

Bitter Bronx
Bitter Bronx

Author: Jerome Charyn

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0871404893

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Longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award Brooklyn is dead. Long live the Bronx! In Bitter Bronx, Jerome Charyn returns to his roots and leads the literary renaissance of an oft-overlooked borough in this surprising new collection. In Bitter Bronx, one of our most gifted and original novelists depicts a world before and after modern urban renewal destroyed the gritty sanctity of a land made famous by Ruth, Gehrig, and Joltin' Joe. Bitter Bronx is suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place, combining a keen eye for detail with Jerome Charyn's lived experience. These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row, amid a "land of deprivation…where fathers trundled home…with a monumental sadness on their shoulders." In "Lorelei," a lonely hearts grifter returns home and finds his childhood sweetheart still living in the same apartment house on the Concourse; in "Archy and Mehitabel" a high school romance blossoms around a newspaper comic strip; in "Major Leaguer" a former New York Yankee confronts both a gang of drug dealers and the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought in his old neighborhood; and in three interconnected stories—"Silk & Silk," "Little Sister," and "Marla"—Marla Silk, a successful Manhattan attorney, discovers her father's past in the Bronx and a mysterious younger sister who was hidden from her, kept in a fancy rest home near the Botanical Garden. In these stories and others, the past and present tumble together in Charyn's singular and distinctly "New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches" (John Leonard, New York Times). Throughout it all looms the "master builder" Robert Moses, a man who believed he could "save" the Bronx by building a highway through it, dynamiting whole neighborhoods in the process. Bitter Bronx stands as both a fictional eulogy for the people and places paved over by Moses' expressway and an affirmation of Charyn's "brilliant imagination" (Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune).

South Bronx Battles
South Bronx Battles

Author: Carolyn McLaughlin

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0520288971

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Community activist Carolyn McLaughlin takes us on a journey of the South Bronx through the eyes of its community members. Facing burned-out neighborhoods of the 1970s, the community fought back. McLaughlin illustrates the spirit of the community in creating a vibrant, diverse culture and its decades-long commitment to develop nonprofit housing and social-services, and to advocate for better education, health care, and a healthier environment. For the South Bronx to remain a safe haven for poor families, maintaining affordable housing is the central—but most challenging—task. South Bronx Battles is the comeback story of a community that was once in crisis but now serves as a beacon for other cities to rebuild, while keeping their neighborhoods affordable.

It's All One Case
It's All One Case

Author: Paul Nelson

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1606998889

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This is a prose series of unpublished interviews with, and a visual retrospective of, the seminal mid- to late-20th century literary crime writer. In 1976, critic Paul Nelson spent several weeks interviewing legendary detective writer Ross Macdonald, who elevated the form to a new literary level. “We talked about everything imaginable,” Nelson wrote―including Macdonald’s often meager beginnings; his dual citizenship; writers, painters, music, and movies he admired; The Great Gatsby, his favorite book; how he used symbolism to change detective writing; and more. This book, published in a handsome, oversized format, collects these unpublished interviews and is a visual history of Macdonald’s professional career. It is illustrated with rare and select items from one of the world’s largest private archives of Macdonald ephemera; reproduces, in full color, the covers of the various editions of Macdonald’s more than two dozen books; collects facsimile reproductions of select pages from his manuscripts, as well as magazine spreads; and presents rare photos, many never before seen.

The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt and His Times
The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt and His Times

Author: Jerome Charyn

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2019-01-08

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1631493884

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"Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible." —Tom Bissell Raising the literary bar to a new level, Jerome Charyn re-creates the voice of Theodore Roosevelt, the New York City police commissioner, Rough Rider, and soon- to-be twenty-sixth president through his derring-do adventures, effortlessly combining superhero dialogue with haunting pathos. Beginning with his sickly childhood and concluding with McKinley’s assassination, the novel positions Roosevelt as a “perfect bull in a china shop,” a fearless crime fighter and pioneering environmentalist who would grow up to be our greatest peacetime president. With an operatic cast, including “Bamie,” his handicapped older sister; Eleanor, his gawky little niece; as well as the devoted Rough Riders, the novel memorably features the lovable mountain lion Josephine, who helped train Roosevelt for his “crowded hour,” the charge up San Juan Hill. Lauded by Jonathan Lethem for his “polymorphous imagination and crack comic timing,” Charyn has created a classic of historical fiction, confirming his place as “one of the most important writers in American literature” (Michael Chabon).

Cesare
Cesare

Author: Jerome Charyn

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1942658516

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A spy navigates the labyrinthine horrors of Nazi Germany, on a mission to save the woman he loves “Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words. . . . [Cesare is] provocative, stimulating and deeply satisfying.” —Washington Post On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him “Cesare” after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr’s enemies. Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin’s Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her. Cesare is a literary thriller and a love story born of the horrors of a country whose culture has died, whose history has been warped, and whose soul has disappeared. Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York.

Sergeant Salinger
Sergeant Salinger

Author: Jerome Charyn

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1942658753

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A shattering biographical novel of J.D. Salinger in combat “Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war—from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a “spook,” with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell. Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations. Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin. He lives in New York.

Jerzy
Jerzy

Author: Jerome Charyn

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Published: 2017-02-20

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 194265815X

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"A moving attempt to trace the connections between Kosinski's wartime struggles and postwar fictions." —New Yorker "Jerzy is a novel with a light touch that's still capable of lifting heavy subjects. Charyn knows what he wants to do and knows how to do it. . . . [He] show[s] that all forms of power are pretty much alike, or at least connected—Hollywood, Capitol Hill, Kensington Palace, the Kremlin. Because Kosinski is a figure who proves (if we still need to learn it) that the craziness of American life may have more in common with the craziness of Russia and Europe than we like to think." —New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. He won major literary awards, befriended actor Peter Sellers (who appeared in the screen adaptation of his novel Being There), and was a guest on talk shows and at the Oscars. But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works. Jerome Charyn lends his unmistakable style to this most American story of personal disintegration, told through the voices of multiple narrators—a homicidal actor, a dominatrix, and Joseph Stalin's daughter—who each provide insights into the shifting facets of Kosinski's personality. The story unfolds like a Russian nesting doll, eventually revealing the lost child beneath layers of trauma, while touching on the nature of authenticity, the atrocities of WWII, the allure of sadomasochism, and the fickleness of celebrity. Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel.

In the Shadow of King Saul
In the Shadow of King Saul

Author: Jerome Charyn

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1942658435

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"Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature." —Michael Chabon "Whatever milieu [Charyn] chooses to inhabit . . . his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable." —Jonathan Lethem "With his customary linguistic verve and pulsing imagination, Charyn serves up here some of the tastiest essay writing available. He knows and loves New York past and present, and he draws on a lifetime of raucous experience and dedicated reading for a rich, heady, satisfying brew." —Phillip Lopate In the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates expressed her admiration for an equally prolific contemporary: "Among Charyn's writerly gifts is a dazzling energy. . . . [He is] an exuberant chronicler of the mythos of American life"; the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers." In these ten essays, Charyn shares personal stories about places steeped in history and myth, including his beloved New York, and larger-than-life personalities from the Bible and from the worlds of film, literature, politics, sports, and the author's own family. Together, writes Charyn, these essays create "my own lyrical autobiography. Several of the selections are about other writers, some celebrated, some forgotten. . . . All of [whom] scalped me in some way, left their mark." Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, Charyn has been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Just Kids From the Bronx
Just Kids From the Bronx

Author: Arlene Alda

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2015-03-03

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1627790969

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"A down-to-earth, inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled." —President Bill Clinton "Fascinating . . . . Made me wish I had been born in the Bronx." —Barbara Walters A touching and provocative collection of memories that evoke the history of one of America's most influential boroughs—the Bronx—through some of its many success stories The vivid oral histories in Arlene Alda's Just Kids from the Bronx reveal what it was like to grow up in the place that bred the influencers in just about every field of endeavor today. The Bronx is where Michael Kay, the New York Yankees' play-by-play broadcaster, first experienced baseball, where J. Crew's CEO Millard (Mickey) Drexler found his ambition, where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dava Sobel fell in love with science early on and where music-making inspired hip hop's Grandmaster Melle Mel to change the world of music forever. The parks, the pick-up games, the tough and tender mothers, the politics, the gangs, the food—for people who grew up in the Bronx, childhood recollections are fresh. Arlene Alda's own Bronx memories were a jumping-off point from which to reminisce with a nun, a police officer, an urban planner, and with Al Pacino, Mary Higgins Clark, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, Maira Kalman, Bobby Bonilla, and many other leading artists, athletes, scientists and entrepreneurs—experiences spanning six decades of Bronx living. Alda then arranged these pieces of the past, from looking for violets along the banks of the Bronx River to the wake-up calls from teachers who recognized potential, into one great collective story, a film-like portrait of the Bronx from the early twentieth century until today.